


Divine

by Goldmonger



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Brother Feels, Death, Gen, Nihilism, This Got dark real fast, coda to ragnarok, i may be insulting the work of the russos but their carnage in IW will upset me so, or opening to infinity war
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-29
Updated: 2018-03-29
Packaged: 2019-04-14 17:53:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14141355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Goldmonger/pseuds/Goldmonger
Summary: Gods, meet Titan.





	Divine

**Author's Note:**

> Infinity War is in like a month, so instead of studying for finals I decided to write something that will probably be disproved in a couple of weeks. idek about my priorities anymore. Thor deserves better, etc etc

_Through me you pass into the city of woe:_  
_Through me you pass into eternal pain:_  
_Through me among the people lost for aye._

_Justice the founder of my fabric mov'd:_  
_To rear me was the task of power divine,_  
_Supremest wisdom, and primeval love._

_Before me things create were none, save things_  
_Eternal, and eternal I endure._  
_All hope abandon ye who enter here._

_\- Dante Alighieri_

 

*******

 

 

They took apart the ship like a child pulling the wings off an insect; rapidly, methodically, the hunger of the violence urgent and atavistic. Thor’s hands bled where he held torn bulkheads of the starboard side together like a loosening stitch, his sternum creaking and his skin splitting as the vessel disintegrated from beneath his fingers. The shields of the Grandmaster’s most opulent vessel fizzled intermittently, and Asgardians screamed in terror as they felt the icy vacuum of space snatch at them and disappear, leaving them breathless and scattered across the floor.

“RUN,” Thor wanted to yell, but sense and exhaustion stopped him.

_Run where? To whom?_

Heimdall was shouting something at him, golden sword flashing as he brought down two, four, seven snapping creatures gnarled and hideous as sin. They were pouring from where the behemoth had rammed them and boarded moments ago, scrabbling through the ragged aperture in the hull and over the walls, across the ceiling, ripping each other to shreds in their eagerness to get into the fray. Something wet ripped inside him and Thor made an animal sound, the bulkhead whirling away into the mouth of the alien ship.

“The shields,” he gasped, falling on all fours among his people. “Are they –,”

“On reserve power, my king,” said a woman with ancient eyes, her grip firm as she hauled him to his feet. “I heard the host system say it a little while ago. The Valkyrie took the man who can transform into the green troll to fix it, but -,”

A roar, unmistakeable and despairing, filled the chamber that Heimdall was working so hard to clear of the alien invaders. Even he paused briefly, allowing one of the soldiers to draw blood, bright where it welled under his clothes. He resumed his task with renewed fervour, but Thor could feel a twisting in his chest that had nothing to do with his throbbing shoulder.

“The lower decks are filling out the emergency escape pods,” he directed at the woman who helped him. “You can’t wait any longer. Go to the ones aft of the ship and make sure the children get on first.”

The woman nodded, grabbing another woman by the hand and taking off at a sprint. The crowd moved after her like one organism as Thor repeated his instructions in a carrying undertone, casting glances behind him at the horde that had doubled in size while he spoke. In his periphery Heimdall was swarmed and fell, and there was little thought that went into his abrupt about-face then; lightning pierced mottled bodies and splayed them open in bloodless, smoking strikes, the rancid stench of burned hair and rotted meat fouling the dwindling air.

“Heimdall!”

“I’m all right, Your Highness,” coughed Heimdall as he popped up from a mound of slain aliens, smeared with an indefinable rainbow of fluids. “Tripped, is all.” He lodged his sword through an invader’s stomach and bisected it at the waist, his fury passionless as both halves slumped to the side.

Thor dispatched another few without relish as he watched more tumble through the breach with savage glee, noses twitching toward the straggling Asgardians.

“Did you hear Hulk just now? They were supposed to fix the shields and restart the engine.”

Heimdall moved and dirt-coloured blood flew like the foam of a cresting ocean wave. “Yes, I heard. Your Highness -,”

He was interrupted by a terrible, drowning screech, metal scraping another inviolable metal in a devastatingly loud battle of wills. Thor thought he knew who won when the noise was punctuated by the sound of a collapsing city. Something with which he was all too familiar.

“They’re destroying the ship,” said Thor, numbly, like he was commenting on the state of a particularly dusty mantelpiece. He sent fatal threads of electricity through a dozen hearts as he tried to think – to understand – because this was no normal enemy, no intergalactic pirate with balls of vibranium, no, this was something with far more specific and thoroughly vicious intent –

“Heimdall,” he said sharply, and the erstwhile golden guard of the Bifrost turned to him, shadows in those eerie eyes of his.

“No.”

“Time is running out. Our people have to get off this godforsaken ship. You have to get them off it.” Thor turned a clutch of aliens to ash.

“I will not leave you.” Heimdall’s blade slashed and stabbed, his fighting efficacious as ever. It was his voice that had quivered, for the first time in the thousand or so years Thor had known him. Clearing a path between them, he swept aside the berms of dead soldiers and grasped Heimdall’s sword arm. He wouldn’t let his old friend look away. Not this time.

“This is the first wave. Pawns, to keep us engaged,” he said, batting away a phalanx of snarling creatures with a spray of lightning. “Their true show of force is coming. I feel real evil here, Heimdall, the kind that doesn’t take prisoners, and definitely not ones without a kingdom to taunt.”

“I swore to protect -,”

“This vessel wasn’t built for the assault of a world-killer like that ship. We have minutes left. Minutes. You know your duty.”

A pause, sombre. “To the people.”

“The people. The last of us.” Thor dragged him into a quick, painful one-armed embrace, and pulled away before he did anything he might regret, like give him a proper goodbye. Heimdall gave himself the smallest indulgence of a sad smile, bowing.

“My king.”

 He swivelled and launched himself through the intensifying horde like a knife cleaving through meat, swift and sure. Figures dropped away as he ambushed the sealed door at the other side of the deck, but most of them were exclusively focused on Thor by then, the aroma of burning flesh making him dizzy as he fought an assault that was building momentum.

How long did he have? His shoulder was tearing anew as fast as his muscles tried to knit together again, and his left side was being battered all the colours of a frost giant without depth perception offered by a healthy pair of functioning eyes. He filled the perforated chamber with light as though he could expand it throughout space, block out every star and shame every supernova with the blinding flashes that crackled over every inch of his being; nothing was left alive in here and he would leave nothing alive out there that tried to come in either - one click of his fingers and he could stop bloodflow, stir-fry a brain, and if that worked on the living it could work on a ship, the ship –

His stomach cushioned a projectile fired from outside the Grandmaster’s vessel, turning his limited vision black for a nanosecond and stealing what breath he had left as he bounced against the bulkhead with a clang. He scrambled for purchase against the floor, still slippery with viscera. There was a crack in his breastplate, fine as a strand of hair.

“Resilient,” a voice from far away intoned curiously. “An annoying feature in a victim.”

Another projectile, careening off his bad shoulder this time and planting him into the bulkhead with a sickening crunch. Thor didn’t scream. He didn’t want to open his mouth in case he’d bitten his tongue in half. He summoned lightning, triumph surging inside him when he heard a gratifying hiss and garbled speech that had to be a manner of swearing. Long, thick fingers scaled like the back of a newt grabbed his jaw, jerking it so he was gazing into a face a mother would surely smother rather than have to love it.

“Where is it?” Pain from Thor’s unexpected attack gave the words an edge, and he tightened his grip. “ _Where is it_?”

Thor shot out a closed fist and connected with Ugly’s throat, propelling him back towards the gaping hole that was losing structural integrity with every breath they took. He extricated himself from the crater his body had made and drew down another skein of lightning, trying to favour the side that hadn’t been surprised by a torpedo.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, “but this is your final opportunity to take your ship and your army and flee. I will not offer again.”

Ugly was hunched across the chamber, struggling upright with an odd expression on his broad, flat face. If Thor didn’t know any better he would have called it anticipation.

“The Master will make you relinquish it regardless of what you do to me,” he rasped, his grey skin charred at the neck. “He is coming.” He twitched his head to the side, a wry smirk spreading, ink in water. “He is not alone.”

A monster appeared with a crash that shook the Grandmaster’s vessel so hard Thor was thrown on his rear. A heinous clanging could be heard several decks below as something massive and crucial was shaken loose under the stress, the accompanying screams cut short turning Thor’s blood to ice.

The monster was bigger than Hulk, bigger than the giants Thor had fought in his youth. Its colossal body was armoured, its teeth curved like tusks, and it was headed for him with steps that punched depressions in the floor of the chamber. There was another distant roar, one of fear this time, and the keening of metal, again; it was a persistent whine in the back of his head, surrounding him like a smell. What he had said to Heimdall was correct; the vessel was coming apart, and fast.

He raised his hands, crackling blue, as the monster opened its mouth in a battle cry. It had almost closed the distance between them when Thor was yanked backwards through what seemed to be a sheet of cold, pitch-black water. He blinked rapidly and found he was not only completely dry, but standing almost nose-to-nose with Loki in the antechamber adjacent to the hall he had just been in. He was about to speak when the monster crashed through the bulkhead behind him and into the opposite wall, its elephantine skin rippling as it tried to get up, its grunts becoming louder and more frustrated.

“No time,” said Loki, his fingers curled around Thor’s elbow in a vice. He was white and wide-eyed with what Thor realised was genuine terror, and for some reason this unnerved him beyond all that had happened so far. If even Loki could see no way out, if he was still here –

“Where’s Banner and Valkyrie?” Thor demanded, shaking his arm. Loki seemed to snap out of a trance, and pulled Thor down the corridor at a brisk jog. The monster behind them was making worryingly quick progress getting itself free, urging their pace.

“They were below trying to fix the shields and life support,” said Loki, breathing heavily. He was streaked with soot and alien blood, and some of his hair appeared to have been singed off. “I was repelling an attack on the civilians with that Kronan fool when I heard Dr Banner get unceremoniously dispatched in the direction of the Tranta System.”

Loki stopped beside a maintenance panel by the elevator and slapped it, green light sizzling something underneath. An emergency hatch popped open in front of them, but Thor held out an arm to prevent him dropping into it, quelling the panic that was roiling just under the surface of what he hoped was a measured exterior.

“Was he alive?”

“I don’t know what that beast can survive. He was green when he was launched, that’s all I know. You must have heard him.”

Thor had, and the memory pitched nightmarish scenarios of Banner lost for all time, dying, but unable to die, as he floated in space forever. Loki was already in the maintenance hatch, and was hissing for him to follow. He did, haphazardly attempting to construct plans to rescue Banner on top of everything else.

“And Valkyrie? Did you see her?”

“She was corralling people into escape pods, last I saw. She was injured while we battled the invading forces. I don’t know if she left with the pods or not.”

Thor filed that information away too, because a phantom ache had begun in his chest, a terrible twisting grief that hadn’t taken shape yet because he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to be mourning. He had wept for his mother, raged and loved harder for her, and he believed he had been starting to heal over, scabbed and solid, when he and Jane had held each other’s hands and found the contact cold. Then the burning, horrible relief of Loki, itching to embrace over a distance galaxies wide until their father left him too. When Hela had shown up, taken innocents from his home world, the carapace over that wound had already been excoriated; she took it and twisted another knife inside. Sister. Blood of my own blood. She poured out the rest of it thoughtlessly, Hogun, Fandral, Volstagg -

_your planet, your people, our father_

Odin had given his right eye for knowledge. Thor wondered sometimes if his had been taken for his persistent, damaging lack of it.

He was still moving down the hatch ladder, barely a twitch to bely the tempest that was rising inside.

When the Goddess of Death was killed, who took over?

They came to the next deck and ventured into the empty corridor cautiously, Loki’s knives glittering in the flickering overhead lights.

“We have to get onto that ship,” said Thor, striding forwards to peer out of the floor-length window at the end of the hall. Crashing and roaring could be heard above them, and the ceiling puckered where feet or bullets struck the armoured metal. They were being missed.

“You are insane,” said Loki flatly. “We are finding a leftover pod and getting as far away from here as physically possible.”

Thor felt the ache again, like a claw around his heart squeezing until his breath was taken. _Lost sister, hateful brother,_ he thought. _Lying father, dying mother_. All of them insufficient in the end.

He looked out the window again, its triple-glazing making the implacable blackness beyond distorted into plush velvet, the enveloping folds of the gowns worn by courtiers to Asgardian funerals. Those funerals had been rare and magnificent, boats toting bonfires that reached so high they may have scorched Valhalla, the night air thick with incense and animal blood and raw music. It was almost always warriors they mourned, watching their finely sculpted bodies nestled in furs and trinkets be pulled away by the water, watching those distant, deadly bodies go up in flames with awe. As a child, Thor had always looked for the wounds that killed them before they were parcelled and set sail.

Above him now, there were only small fireworks, little supernovas bursting into spheres of fire that were quickly dissipated into debris dotting the space above them. The alien ship was planted among the fireworks like a bison under a cloud of flies.

“The pods can’t save us,” said Thor, drawing back. He could temper the ache for a short while, if he concentrated. He could set cosmological equations and strategic manoeuvres on top of it, execute a plan and then return to the pain when he had enough time to feel it.

“I don’t -,”

“They’re shooting them down,” said Thor. He wanted to grieve, but he couldn’t see their wounds from here so he turned, calculated, instead. A scientist, not a king.

_King of where? Of whom?_

The aliens had entered through an opening on the deck above; they would surely have done the same thing on multiple levels. Different kinds of engagement. The pawns above had to be the distraction. But a distraction intended to pave the way for what – the monster that raged behind them, fruitlessly searching? Surely that creature was just another agent of chaos, his homely companion had insinuated as much.

“If I knew what they wanted,” said Thor wildly. “They would stop if they had what they wanted.”

“No they wouldn’t,” said Loki, softly enough that it was almost lost in the renewed assault against the deck from above them.

“I need to go back and draw their fire,” murmured Thor, already moving. “It’s their only chance. I would board the ship, but that would take time, and there may still be some alive. If there is one left alive I need to make sure they get away. I need to get this commander’s attention.”

Loki’s hand again on his arm again, cold and hard where it grasped him.

“You’ll die up there.”

“If that’s what it takes.”

His hand stayed his progress again.

“If you don’t die up there it will be worse.”

“What in the nine -,” a breath, harsh -”What in the eight realms are you on about?”

Loki wasn’t just a good liar, he was _the_ liar, he was his mother and father’s student and the connoisseur of their slyest crafts. _Hold this, it won’t bite, I promise. Would I really lead you to a giant’s den to be eaten? Please. I never told Sif you hated her hair, I don’t know what she’s crowing about._

“They look dangerous,” he said, spindly fingers retracting to trace the intaglio on the grip of his knife, repetitive. On anyone else it would have been a plain signifier of building anxiety. “I’m just being cautious in general, brother.”

Fear made him tremble, made him sweat like a human. His eyes were watery where they darted up and away, they said listen, don’t ask.

“Loki -,”

There was an ear-splitting rending of metal, and something colossal filled the space between them, blowing them backwards. Thor flew into another bulkhead, cracking another handful of bones, and hit the floor like a dead weight. He shook pinpricks of light back into darkness and abruptly got vertical, managing it just to see the monster draw itself up to its full height, cramping the corridor as he grinned horribly in the halo of a fading green light. A fist that would have had trouble fitting inside the Hulk’s chest cavity descended towards his face like a meteorite, and all he could think of was his mother, his mother and over six hundred blazing pyres.

 

*******

 

He was slapped awake by a scabrous paw, and hacked up what seemed to be half a lung on the cold and unfamiliar metal floor, his vision still bleary. When he turned to appraise his apprehenders, he was met with another strike.

“Thor, I believe.” The voice came from a being that loomed, a being that ate things that steamed and wriggled when they died. “I understand you fancy yourself a god.”

Thor orientated himself a little better, blinked away blood and surreptitiously sought green without actually turning his head to search for it. If Loki had escaped there may actually be hope for them – unless he had slipped away, unfettered now by any family or country responsibility. Yet the icy grip on his arm, pressing down in desperation… In any case, it was looking like Thor would be too dead to see the results of his brother’s choice. Swallowing, he set himself the task of beholding the imposing being draped across the tarnished golden throne on a raised platform of dirty brass that had seen many more lightyears than washcloths. Shadows advanced to surround him, bristling with weapons as they moved to guard their commander from any rash kind of martyrdom that Thor wasn’t keen to offer. The being shifted, and the scant starlight behind him cast a silhouette that drowned them all in darkness.

_Titan_ , he thought, before he perceived another monster or giant or alien.

_[Your people called me a god. What do they say here then, about vanquishing a god?_

Stark’s teeth had flashed, the repressed amusement that came with being in on the joke. God-eater. Child-devourer. The steady and irrevocable stream in an hourglass.

_Just stories, but makes you think._ More teeth, hidden eyes behind coloured glass.]

“I am Thor, King of the Nine Realms,” said Thor presently, in a worn and haggard way. “I take it you are the commander of this vessel?”

“I certainly am,” said the being.

“And what right,” said Thor, barely quaking as he got his legs under him, “do you claim that permits an unprovoked attack on a peaceful civilian ship?”

The being stood from his throne and approached, calm and sure as one of the giant feline predators of Alfheim. He was of a height with Hulk, similarly burly and thickly corded with muscle; but where Hulk lurched and lolloped about in play, the being before him strode with purpose, spine rigid as a broadsword, his prodigious chin held aloft like a conqueror. One of his meaty, bruise-coloured hands reached out casually and picked Thor up by the throat.

“Your toy rowboat out there has something that belongs to me,” said the being. “So I’m breaking it.” A tilt of the head. “Do you know who I am, little god?”

“Prostrate yourself before Lord Thanos,” came a familiar snarl, and Thor wondered vaguely, as arterial blood was redirected south of his head, if Ugly had been the one to drag him here. The monster was huffing and puffing somewhere to his left, so maybe not.

“Time enough for that,” said Thanos with traces of conviviality as his hand flexed, Thor’s windpipe crumpling like a paper cup. Thanos was crooning, but there were rusted nails beneath the feather lightness of his tone. It sounded like mockery, and Thor wished he had the faculties just then to decipher what dishonour he should be defending himself against, but the cushion of oblivion was so close –

Thanos dropped him suddenly, and his back absorbed the rough landing against yet another hard surface. He coughed, flecking the floor with pink spittle. He was unused to seeing his own blood. It reminded him of a woman, of a broken ceramic mug, of being unable to fly. Who else had made him bleed like this?

The hand, grotesque in its size and flexibility, curved over the pate of his skull and dragged, pulled him over a step and yanked until he was mostly upright. He was turned, mechanically, to face the assembly of alien guards that had likely been instrumental in decimating his people and their means of protection. He recognised Ugly and his monster easily enough, but a scowling female garbed head to toe in black and silver and her lurking, rat-faced companion were new to him.

“Many thanks to you for finally joining us, Your Majesty,” said Thanos, every syllable bloated with sarcasm and utterly void of amusement now. Thor squinted through the pressure of the giant fingers at either temple and watched as the monster, grunting, thrust something scrawny into plain sight of the titan. Thor made a noise which would have shamed him in any other battle scenario.

Loki straightened up, pointedly dusting off his tunic despite the extensive stains of blood and grime.

“My lord,” he said. “You called on me.”

Thanos squeezed and Thor unsuccessfully stifled a cry of pain. The pressure was building in waves of agony that made him nauseous and sick with anger.

“I came, as you can see.” The words were blurted, biting. The female alien was holding a scythe inches from his ribcage and he hadn’t even looked around.

“No, puppet king, I had to draw you out,” said Thanos. “I had to stamp all over that rowboat until you scuttled right into my hand. You tried to run from me.” A squeeze, Thor’s forced inhale and a trickle of warmth down his cheekbone, his forehead. “Why did you run? Was Earth not a kingdom to your standards?”

“It – it was -,”

“It was too much for you. Other scuttling things that belong to me report that some humans, and this little god here,” he shook Thor and something cracked, dislodged or was punctured inside him - “They tore you from your throne.”

“My lord Thanos, if I could explain -,”

“And my Stone,” Thanos snorted like a bull, his great chest moving steadily up and down. “My Stone, my property, was taken away and hidden. Your debt, little puppet, was not paid.” He lifted Thor roughly from where he was starting to slump to his knees, the edges of his vision blackening to vignettes. “Not even close.”

“I have it. Please. There’s no need for – for further violence.”

Thor willed himself into awareness, sinking his teeth into the flesh of the inside of his cheek until his mouth filled with blood. He could see Loki more clearly, his pasty skin grey as a lake. Their eyes met, and Thor asked _why_ , and his brother’s answering smile was a fleeting quirk at the side of his mouth. _It’s in my nature._ His lip trembled, and Thor thought about how much control Loki desired outside of himself. A way to sate the chaos inside was by ordering everything else.

“Violence will consume the universe,” said Thanos, and the oxygen on the bridge seemed to freeze and dissipate; the statement of intent was absolute, pure as hatred, or fire. Bone cracked and blood bubbled in his ears and Loki was saying something, horror colouring his drawl into the pleas of a child.

“ _My Stone, puppet king_.”

Blue light filled the cavernous chamber, and Loki looked briefly like his doomed birthright, wintry as a corpse. Thanos dropped Thor again, and this time he saw no reason to try to get up.

The Tesseract glowed in Thanos’s gnarled fist, and when he burst it with more vigour than he’d clenched Thor’s cranium, even the guards couldn’t stop themselves from cringing. The Stone bled gleaming light into the titan’s veins, causing him to gasp with pleasure and bring it carefully, slowly over his heart. The power of the Stone was only relished for a moment; Thanos gestured at Ugly, off to his left, who nodded earnestly and glided towards a plinth holding a bound pewter case in suspended gravity. When it was gingerly unclasped and the golden gauntlet within was removed with the utmost caution, Thor allowed the iron will borne since adolescence to hoist him to a sitting position. He brushed blood and tears from his eyes and focused, heartened when the tips of his fingers crackled and sparked. He could do it.

Loki’s arm, outthrust like a shield, rendered him breathless.

_Don’t you dare_. The words were mindless, marks clawed into wood by ragged fingernails, despair empty and endless before him like his parents and sister and friends and planet, like the gaping crater of his eye socket.

Thanos turned with a smile, broad, the teeth yellowed and mossy. His magnificent armour extended now over his forearms and hands, the plated gold garish against the violet of his lined skin.

Loki moved his lips silently, not breaking from Thor’s gaze once.

He had to have the last word, every time – what was the point, he had once said to Thor after a particularly idiotic brawl with a party of light elves, both of them and the Warriors Three drunk as greenhorns where they gambolled around the Great Hall afterwards; what was the point, he insisted, as Thor giggled uncontrollably and Sif tried and failed to wrest a priceless vase off Fandral’s head, what was the point of a good fight if the other side doesn’t leave it knowing we, the victors, are better than they are? What, Thor had said, hiccupping, what are you talking about. Wit, Loki had said, his eyes grey and shining. One has to leave a fight making sure his opponent feels like an ass. Like he’s been one-upped. It’s a mind game, of sorts. They have to know I won.

The magic was quick and strong, and turned the windows of the bridge to dust before he launched Thor through them, Thor feeling rather as though he’d been saddled with another torpedo. His _NO_ was ripped from his tongue as the green light pushed him farther and farther away, another deep space explorer now like poor Dr Banner, spun out, adrift. Debris and bodies clothed in frost drifted serenely past him, but the image of the titan sweeping over his brother like the rainfall over the ocean, and the scarlet mist that was all that was left was branded onto him, like he just glanced away from staring into the sun.

His hands closed on nothing. The light was green, fading, not his. How far could it reach? He turned to ask his brother, because surely –

He met with another window, with a _thunk_ heard throughout the galaxy. Strange faces dribbled towards him and the grief he’d scrunched down tight arose like bile. Pain followed him into darkness. He didn’t know if anything else had this time.

**Author's Note:**

> //
> 
>  
> 
> \- I actually dig the Black Order and how metal they are, so looking forward to (being scared of) that
> 
> \- I had to give Heimdall some sort of shout out because if he is just killed off willy-nilly.... whew boy.... I will issue empty  
> threats on the internet
> 
> \- Also just to be clear. I WILL fight Thanos in a Denny's parking lot at 3am


End file.
